Follow Us on Twitter

Find Us On Facebook

A cable car seen from Pão de Açúcar (Sugarloaf Mountain) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photo by Phillie Casablanca.

Cable cars, also known as ropeways or aerial tramways, don’t get much respect. These types of transportation systems, in which a cabin or other conveyance is suspended from a fixed cable and pulled by another cable, are often thought of as tourist-movers. But cable cars can have some practical applications in urban settings. They are especially useful where inclines are too steep for conventional mass transit and where they can serve as feeders to bus and metro systems. They have been successfully applied in growing cities of the developing world, where slums are often clustered on precipitous hills surrounding urban centers.

Doppelmayr/Garaventa Group, a ropeway engineering company, published a brochure, “Aerial Ropeways as an Innovation Solution for Urban Transport,” that outlines many of the benefits of cable car systems, including the following:

They are a low-emissions form of transportation, as their motion generates less resistance than land-bound transport, so less electrical power is required to drive the ropes. Additionally, less energy is required for start-up because they move continuously.

Their aerial position means they can be readily integrated into the cityscape and combined with other elements of the public transit network without encountering obstacles on the ground.

They don’t compete with traffic.

They provide no-wait service, moving continuously without interruption. Service frequency can be adjusted to suit demand by varying the speed of the circulating rope, eliminating empty runs in off-peak times and waiting times during peak periods.

They require little space.

They are accessible to passengers with impaired mobility and wheelchair users because the cabin floor is level with the platform.

They can be equipped with wireless connection allowing direct audio/CCTV communication between cabins and stations.

Critics note the potential safety issues presented by cable car systems. In the case of an emergency, such as a power outage, passengers will be stranded in the cabins. The Medellín system is addressing this issue by providing a communication system in every cabin should an emergency occur.

Below we describe several examples of cable car systems.

Medellín Metrocable

Medellin's Metrocable connects residents of the poor hillside barrios to the rest of the city, something conventional transit can't do because of the steep slopes. Photo: joshuaheller.

Medellín, Colombia’s gondola lift system, called Metrocable, provides a complementary transit service to Medellín’s Metro. In fact, Metrocable is a branch of Metro, and both are managed by the same corporation and can be used for a single fare.

Metrocable was designed to reach some of the least developed suburban areas of Medellín, poor barrios on the hills surrounding the city that cannot be reached by conventional public transit. Opened in 2006, Metrocable was intended to connect the inhabitants of these barrios to the rest of the city. It has succeeded in easing their commutes and has also helped revitalize some of the areas it passes through. “People in Santo Domingo [one of the barrios] used to say that they weren’t part of Medellin,” says a cable car engineer. “They had to take three separate buses to get to it. But now they feel that they are involved in the city.”

Metrocable has also become popular among tourists because of its spectacular views of the valley. The newest line was inaugurated in February to connect tourists and locals to Park Arvi, a nature reserve just outside Medellín. The new line is expected to improve security in the area, reducing the presence of paramilitaries and guerrillas. It will also provide residents access to open space, something they don’t always get much of.

Algiers Telepherique

In Algiers, Algeria, a cable car facilitates travel between the modern part of the city built on the level ground by the seashore and the ancient city on a steep hill. It serves as a connection to other mass transit modes, and brings tourists to Notre Dame d’Afrique (Our Lady of Africa), a Roman Catholic church on a cliff overlooking the Bay of Algiers.

Like Medellín, Caracas, Venezuela is in a valley surrounded by hills. Many residents live in the poor barrios in the hills and work in the valley.

In its heyday in the mid-1900s, the city’s cable car connected Caracas with the Caribbean coast on the other side of the mountains. But the system was closed in 1988, and it was not until a few years ago that the Caracas side reopened. (For a more detailed history, see this travelogue in the Economist).

But the system has been controversial. The cable cars were suspended for more than a year following damage to the support pillars caused by typhoon-related mudslides in 2008 . The temporary closing affected local small business owners, whose revenues dropped nearly 90 percent over the past 18 months, according to one news report.

That’s a great comment Franco, and it shows how people need more education on service levels instead of transit types. ACE could do a perfectly good job of bringing those folks to the BART station if it were as frequent. Folks see that it isn’t and just assume the reason why BART is better is because it is BART, not because it comes every 20 minutes.

Livermore definitely needs an extension, although like John, I too have a hard time justifying the price tag with the projected ridership numbers. Could the numbers be higher when factoring in potential ridership from over the Altamont? Maybe. Five years, ten years out? From the meetings I’ve gone to, participants want BART tech, not DMU’s therefore reducing potential cost savings, and ACE doesn’t yet provide BART-like frequency.

Cable cars are very useful in certain situations, and are a vastly underused option in most of the world. Maybe it’s because we don’t take them seriously; they are just a ride at a ski resort or a theme park.

I blame Disney for this, because Walt added the “Skyway” to Disneyland in 1956, thinking it would be a useful transportation option in the future. Instead, it became just another amusement ride, much like Walt’s Monorail (added 1959) would become.

http://twitter.com/IFUD IFUD

Not just for tourists anymore: cable cars catch on around the globe as effective form of urban transport http://ow.ly/1ySDK via @TheCityFix

Cable propelled transit solutions are more than capable of expansion and extension after initial installation. The idea that they can’t are based on outmoded technologies and techniques that simply don’t apply any more.

One of the reasons cable and urban gondolas have seen a resurgence of late is due to major technological improvements in speed, expandability, capacity and flexibility. Cable can now travel huge distances at speeds faster than most trams, streetcars and LRT with comparable capacity levels. Intermediary stations, urban configurations and turning stations are all possible.

2. Megan, do you have any information why the Maokong designers didn’t implement any lightning ground systems? These are very cheap to install and would have eliminated any lighting problems. Also, it’s possible to earthquake-proof and hurricane-proof a cable system, why weren’t those systems implemented?

Cable cars are good for what they offer, but unfortunately their glamour drives people to suggest them where significantly better solutions exist. In Helsinki some people actually proposed a (separate) cable car system to connect some outlying regions over a bay to the city proper.. Luckily an extension of the existing tram system went through instead. Largest bridges in the city to come, with a solid link for light traffic as well as the trams. No cars allowed! Why the tram? The existing tram system lies near and is going to be extended to that direction anyway. There is a number of old industrial and cargo loading zone to be cleaned up for new city center blocks that way. The tram is also faster than the cable car would be, which boosts the property values just in time for bulk of the sales. In the near future the tram network is feasibly extended further up and along that side of the bay, which simply isn’t possible for cable cars.